Macom slid the memory disk in his pocket, grabbed his coat and badge, and headed for the communications tower. Outside, the bright but cold day encouraged him to walk briskly under the deep blue skies that reminded him of his childhood on his home planet.
Along the uneven sidewalk, a treacherous minefield of puddles from last night’s downpour made it necessary to focus on one’s steps. As Macom waved off a group of teens looking to peddle their counterfeit ration cards, he accidentally stepped on a loose tile, which promptly responded by squirting a copious stream of muddy water all over his right leg and torso. Without the slightest flinch, Macom continued onward, his mind focused on the task at hand.
It was not much to look at from the outside. Like most other buildings, the round-shaped communications “tower” was half-way embedded into the ground as a way to take advantage of the earth’s biomass and its natural cooling and heating effects. On top, transmission disks no larger than a few feet in diameter adorned the building like ears on the head of a sleeping, mossy giant.
Inside, however, the space was majestic and luminous. Beyond the security checkpoints, the circular, expansive lobby was centered around a grand spherical computer. The Galactic Timechain, as it was known, was encased in glass, and around it, a second layer formed a terrarium of the native ecosystem, meant to mirror the resilient and self-sustaining nature of the Timechain’s distributed network.
Along the curved wall, intricate but faded murals of historic figures blended into textual inscriptions of poems and quotes, and from above, a beam of sunlight from the roof-timer cycled its’ focus through each piece of art as new blocks were added to the Timechain. The space felt more like a temple than a government building.
‘Good morning Sub-Commander,’ the guard uttered as Macom flashed his badge, ‘you are earlier today than usual.’ The greeting was silently acknowledged with a stoic nod, and as he was waiting for the gate to open, the beam of sunlight moved to the left, and the newly illuminated quote on the gallery wall caught his attention.
--
Time is an abstraction at which we arrive by means of the changes of things.
--
Macom had never really understood the meaning of those abstract words. But today of all days, the quote he had seen a thousand times found within him a renewed resonance. He remembered being taught that in ancient civilizations, humans measured the passing of time by the ticking of metal arms around a circle, which was meant to track the astrological movement of planets around a sun. As interstellar travel evolved, this antiquated system created synchronization nightmares, for everyone had a different definition of what “time” was, of how long it took their planet to circle their sun.
Now, the addition of new blocks on the Galactic Timechain marked the passage of time. Macom felt this was curious. There was nothing in the transactions and records stored within the blocks, in the bits of zeroes and ones, that had a physical existence called “time.” Neither could the humans of antiquity find any physical element constituting “time” in the movement of the planets. The change of any thing, in fact, could be used as the measuring yardstick, and in this particular moment, Macom realized he had been unconsciously measuring time by the quickly changing political situation: the Empire’s draconian laws would open the floodgates to changes not seen since the Wars of Independence. Millennia would happen within the next few blocks, and for that reason, he thought, now was the time for decisive action.
Aided by this newly found revelation, Macom walked across the lobby towards the elevator, finding his way to transcription station #B412. The room, no larger than a regular size office, betrayed no sign of its importance. This station was designed as a decoy and kept as a closely guarded secret, for it contained the Nhafezi Confederacy’s keys, used to compose and transmit blocks onto the Galactic Mempool. As such, the security clearance used to access it also triggered an alert to high command. Even someone of his rank was not supposed to be here unannounced, and Macom knew he would only have a few moments to complete his task.
Standing in front of the door, Macom took a deep breadth to gather his courage, for he knew that as soon as he entered the room and sent the message across the Timechain, there would be no stopping, that there would be no coming back from this. He thought of the countless years of suffering, the bad winters, the unnecessary cruelty of it all. He thought of the despair and hopelessness he saw on so many faces, including his own. Above all, he thought of his brother, now gone.
As long as the life of a star to the human mind, and as short as the span of a human life to a star, the moment ended, and Macom swiped his badge on the door’s console. Moving swiftly now, he slid onto the station chair, picked the memory disk from his pocket and blended it into the transcriptor in one fluid motion. The text appeared before him, exactly as he had last proof-read it. Just as he was about to fetch the keys, a gentle knock came from the door before it opened.
With his heart skipping a beat, Macom saw a familiar figure appear from the corner of his eyes, and quickly composed himself. “I am that predictable,” he said with an air of resignation while still staring into the transcriptor.
“You were never good at hiding that look on your face,” Jiun said sardonically, while closing the door behind her.
Guarding against stalling tactics, he ignored the jab and tried to finish the job, but his fingers had barely moved before Jiun flung her comm tablet and key ring towards his desk.
“No one is coming Macom, I had Ella disengage the alert and now you have my personal key ring. I know you will not stop, not even for me, but I ask you to hear me out. If you still want to go ahead after we are done talking, I won’t stop you.”
The tablet, which had landed with a loud thud and knocked over a mug, displayed ‘#B412, alert disengaged.’ Macom was not the trusting kind, and for a moment he hesitated, thoughts of deception and betrayal rushing through his head. But even after all these years, Jiun’s word still meant something.
“I helped you draft this, remember?” Macom said while turning towards her. “It wasn’t that long ago you agreed we have to send this out.”
“That was before the council voted it down,” Jiun said with a calm assertiveness.
“And that changes nothing. You know better than I do how the Empire is systematically starving us. I am not going to allow them to reduce us to nothing, to drain us of our strength until finally, stripped of all self-respect and dignity, unable to summon the will to fight, they can simply sweep us out with a broom. We must fight,” Macom said emphasizing each word, “even though the council is too afraid, perhaps even too corrupted to do what must be done.”
“I agree, the Empire wants us to do nothing. But they would equally benefit if we over-reacted. Now that Antigonium can be synthesized and mass manufactured, we are disposable. They would like nothing more than to have the perfect excuse to send their destroyers. We have to fight, not to destroy our enemy, but to save what we love, and sending this archive to the Galactic Timechain would be suicidal.”
“The real suicide is already happening Jiun. How many people are starving? How many have taken their own lives in their misery and despair?,” Macom’s voice splintered with the faintest of cracks, before continuing. “How many of our young will they take, once this new round of laws are enforced? Should we wait until we start getting paid in imperial script, or perhaps when we start forgetting our own language? Revolution is not suicide, even if it leads to certain death. Our ancestors knew that when they fought for our independence.”
“You are right, but this is not a decision for you to make. Corrupted as it might be, the council is still needed to organize any meaningful resistance. And we might be able to force their hand, but not if the transgression comes from you Macom. If you do this, they will call it a military coup, and it would only further our internal division and turmoil. That is exactly what the Empire wants. They put us in a position to make an impossible decision, they infiltrate the council with unseen extortion and threats, all so they can watch us implode from the inside. You know this playbook.”
A long silence now enveloped the space between them, words being said without a single sound. The impasse brought into relief their conflicts from eons ago, and as Macom digested the arguments of this latest salvo, he also felt reminded with a certain fondness, why she was who she was, their indisputable moral leader.
Standing up now, Macom walked towards the door, accepting her overture: “Someone has to do it, Jiun. Even if it is a trap, even if it leads to our demise, the archive would guarantee the preservation of our culture and Our-Story for future generations. We must break the long silence. You know it is time.”
As Macon exited the room, he handed her his badge and his Antigonium pendant, the one she had gifted him all those years ago. Now alone, Jiun took a long and deep sigh before heading towards the transcriptor. On the screen, the words they had drafted together stared back at her. She sat down, clutching the pendant that stored his keys, and read it one last time.
--
Top Secret
My name is Jiun Nhafezi, Matriarch of the Nhafezi Confederacy, and these words, inscribed on the Galactic Timechain Codex, block number 226,524,579, will in all likelihood lead to our demise, effectively constituting our people’s last act.
Bitcoin’s Timechain has long afforded the possibility of free speech, and more importantly, the preservation of a lasting legacy against physical genocide and cultural erasure. For the first time ever, the last defiant breath from those facing annihilation will not simply scatter in the wind, unheard of and forgotten by those who seek to erase us from their-story. For the first time ever, they who control the present will not be able to sanitize, re-write, and control the past. Our past, which is also our future.
Even though this tool has been but an open road, useless to those who seek to walk it when a gun is held to their heads, it has nevertheless acted as leverage for those fighting for survival under the Empire’s watchful eye. And for millennia, this leverage has afforded our people a semblance of life: ever since the Independence Wars, our accord has forbidden us from off-planet communication. As long as we supplied the Empire with minerals and kept our words and ideas to ourselves, we were allowed the independence to uphold our customs and organize our own way of life. This is why you might have never heard of our people, or of Kaweah, a faraway moon better known in the ancient world as an Antigonium mine.
But the balance of power has now changed. As our world grew stronger and brighter, so did the Empire’s fear. Our knowledge, our art, our way of life, all of it became dangerous proof that another mode of social organization is not merely possible, but if allowed to flourish, would undermine the deepest moral foundations of the Empire in the eyes and hearts of their own people.
And so we must be destroyed.
First came the impossible mineral quotas, the penalties of which were reduced food supplies. Slowly, they forced us to choose who would go hungry, sowing the seeds of discord. Then, as we grew more desperate, the Empire extended a helping hand, offering to send our young off-world, saddling them with unpayable debts, and scattering them across the stars in search of “a better life.” Now, under the guise of industrial standardization and efficiency management, they are forcing us to adopt the imperial tongue in all curricula and settings, abandoning our own.
Faced with the slow, painful immiseration of our people, and the clear directive to dismantle our society piece by piece, we are left with no choice but to break our long silence, preserving our cultural heritage, our memory and our knowledge on the Timechain. Perhaps the two most important ones are the lexical archive, for those who seek to learn our tongue, and the mineral archive, which includes the hitherto secret chemical composition of the synthetic ingredients needed to mass manufacture Antigonium. Now it becomes open-source, our first, and perhaps last gift to the Universe.
For our transgression, the Empire will soon circle our moon and rain down extinction. Our last efforts to defend ourselves will most likely fail. By the time you receive this message, we will have long ceased to exist. I will presume these words are the only record that will survive us. Our books will be burned, our culture expunged. The young sent to the Ministry of Harmony and Reintegration will likely never speak our language our know of their heritage. Our matriarchs will be sent to the gallows, and our men to labor camps across the known galaxies.
It is our hope that this fate that awaits us, that announces its presence with every word that I convey to you, is but a temporary defeat, a chapter linking our past and the many revolutions to come. Faced with the certainty of a death of the spirit, and the possibility of a death of the body and the flesh, we as a people have chosen to not give up our dignity. Instead, we choose life at its fullest.
As we begin, so we end. This is Our-Story.
EPIC STUFF I LOVE THE CREATIVITY